Sultan Shindig

On the Shindig weekend in July, many of the roads in downtown Sultan close, and traffic in and out of town goes by 3rd Street. At River Park, on the corner of 1st and Main, the Sky Valley Chamber of Commerce runs the festival. It has a street fair of vendors and artisans from the region, food stalls and trucks, bands at the River Park Gazebo, a parade down Main Street, a car show, and fireworks. At its center is the logging contest. In the festival’s own description, loggers “fly up poles, attack an obstacle course with a chainsaw, and throw axes,” and many of them still work in the industry. Entry is free. The 2026 Shindig ran July 10 to 12, and the chamber lists the 2027 dates as July 9 to 11.

Volunteers run the Shindig. The chamber’s director, Debbie Copple, works out of 320 Main Street. The building was once the Citizens State Bank and is officially the Percy Brewster Building, named for a policeman killed by a bank robber. In 2023 Copple told the Everett Herald, “Logging is the historic and cultural heart of our town.”

The weekend at River Park

The fair opens Friday at 4 p.m. with the street fair and the Family Fun Zone, and bands play from 6 to 9. The posted schedule lists The Kettle Black and D’LuJo for Friday night. Saturday runs from 10 in the morning until dusk. Children line up at 8th and Main for the Kids Parade, and the Grand Parade steps off down Main Street at 10:30. In 2023 the kids marched at 10:15, fifteen minutes ahead of the grand parade. Music starts at 11, and Saturday’s listed acts are Blue Mariah, Take Seventeen, Beatdown Saints, and Engage. The 2023 lineup ranged from country to old-school rock ‘n’ roll to salsa, with local acts including the Tarnished Brass Quintet and the Moon Pie Ramblers.

The Family Fun Zone has tie-dye, free throw, Leap Frog Foam, Battle Golf, Granny Pants Races, axe throwing, a dunk tank, a Nerf range, Touch a Truck, a WSDOT Roundabout Race, Legos, an inflatable slide, and Giant Jenga. In 2023 a carnival also ran each day, and visitors who paid to park could cross a new pedestrian bridge straight into the festival. Copple said the parking money went to local youth activities. In 2018 the beer garden was hosted by Timber Monster.

The fireworks start at 10 p.m. on Saturday, and the festival asks people to bring blankets and chairs. Western Display Fireworks puts on the show. In 2023, after Everett’s Fourth of July show with that company fizzled out, Sultan kept its date, and a city spokesperson said, “We’ve always had great shows with Western Display Fireworks.” For years Gordon MacDonald has prepared the ground for the display as a volunteer. Before the 2026 show it took him two days of excavation to undo the effects of the previous December’s flooding. Afterward the chamber wrote that with the rising cost of fireworks, “there was no way we could have afforded to hire this work out.” Another chamber post recalled the night this way: “I will never forget the sounds of Engage rocking the crowd, the joy of the kids sliding down the hill on pizza boxes, and the beautiful nights skies sparkling with color.”

Sunday starts at 10 a.m. with a Community Church Service on the main stage. At the same hour the Show and Shine car show opens and runs until 3. The festival calls it a tradition of more than 30 years. Copple said the 2022 show was its largest, with 126 cars, and Randy Axtman took Best of Show in 2024. Poker Face Seattle and the Moon Pie Ramblers close the music, and the Shindig shuts down at 4.

Poles, hot saws, and the Bull of the Woods

The logging contest begins at noon on Saturday, and the finals are held at noon on Sunday. Events include climbing, the hot saw, and a Chainsaw Quick Carve. The carvings are auctioned at 4 p.m. on Saturday, and a second auction follows on Sunday. Discover Snohomish County, the county visitor bureau, describes the scene: “Chainsaws buzz and whine, echoing through the riverside air.” The overall winner is named Bull of the Woods and receives a cash prize, a trophy, and sometimes a custom engraved throwing ax.

Joshua Randall has won that title many times, maybe eight or nine by his own account; he has lost count. He competes in all the events, and his older brother Jacob runs saws beside him. Their father competed at the Shindig for twenty-five years. “I’ve been attending since I was in diapers,” Joshua said. “I started running a chainsaw as a kid.” From the saw he moved on to climbing poles. Both brothers now run tree services. Joshua started in the field at 18 and opened his first business at 24.

Each year the community also votes on a Logging Marshal. “The logging marshal is a very big deal, the highest honor,” Copple said in 2023, the year it went to Bill Pellham Jr. of Pellham Logging, who began felling trees with his father at 12. Roger Knowlton held the honor in 2009. He came to Sultan in 1960, joined the volunteer fire department in 1963, and became fire chief in 1986. He died in June 2024, and his family asked that memorial gifts go to the chamber’s logging contest.

The festival named Bill Mercer its 2026 Grand Marshal. Born in North Bend, he went into the woods on weekends at age 6 to watch his father, Don, work. In eighth grade he moved to a logging camp at Port Alice, Alaska. At 14 he was splicing haywire and grinding chain for the cutters. He worked in Southern Oregon for Harper Logging until the company found out he was 17. In 1978 he came to Sultan to work for Sam Wold as a timber faller. Later he loaded logs for Carson Helicopters in Idaho, Montana, and Washington. From 2000 to 2014 he ran his own company, Mercer Cutting, felling dangerous trees and clearing storm damage. The festival’s biography says his love “will always be falling timber.”

Gold, rails, and shingle mills

For many generations the Skykomish Tribe had a large, permanent village where the Sultan River meets the Skykomish. Gold brought settlers into the valley as early as 1869. Placer miners were working the Sultan River’s banks in the 1870s, and a rich vein found in 1878 drew more prospectors. In 1880 John Nailor and his wife claimed land at the river’s mouth, where they opened a store and built a ferry and the Pioneer Hotel. In 1885 fifty settlers petitioned for a post office for Sultan City, named after the river. The river itself honored a local chief, T’seul-ted (sometimes written T’seul-Dan), and the newcomers anglicized his name to “Sultan.”

William B. and Agnes Stevens bought 20 acres of the Nailor homestead in 1889, and the plat William filed was dedicated on October 19 of that year. In 1891 and 1892, while the Great Northern Railway laid track through the valley, Sultan City served as a supply station employing about 800 men at the peak of construction. The panic of 1893 slowed the town. In 1894 residents shortened its name to Sultan and offered land and water power to any mill company that would build there. Keef and Perkins, of Machias, put up a double block shingle mill employing sixty to seventy men, and more mills followed. On June 10, 1905, the town’s voters approved incorporation 42 to nothing and elected Hartford M. Meredith mayor. At that time the town’s industries included the Sultan Logging and Railroad Company and a number of shingle mills.

The contest is older than the festival. The Herald reported that Sultan practiced the logging contest for 50 years before the first Shindig. The University of Washington Libraries hold a photograph of a bucking contest at Sultan dated July 4, 1936. By 2023 the Shindig itself was in its 38th year. Sultan has also hosted a larger crowd than the Shindig’s. Starting August 30, 1968, the Sky River Rock Festival and Lighter Than Air Fair drew nearly 20,000 people to a farm near town for three days, with the Grateful Dead and Big Mama Thornton among the performers. When that festival ran out of water, the town supplied some. Council minutes later noted that local officials did not intend to make it a yearly event.

Frank Roesler’s woods, and after

At 93, the former logger Frank Roesler lives on his family’s property in Startup, a few miles up the valley. His family’s logging operation began after World War II, when his brothers came home from the service. Logging was seasonal then. All winter the logging families charged their groceries at the general store and paid off the debt with the first check from the spring harvest. Frank and his father felled trees with a 12-horsepower chainsaw that had an eight-foot blade, and his brothers bucked the logs. The largest tree he remembers felling measured fourteen feet, three inches in diameter. At its peak the family cut one million board feet of fir and hemlock a month and trucked it on State Route 2 to the mills in Everett.

Frank later opened a mill in Startup to cut cedar shingles. It turned out 300 bundles per saw per day, most of them shipped to California for the postwar housing boom. He flew a Cessna to the Washington-Oregon border to pick up machinery parts. He also held a helicopter license and flew supplies to stranded farmers when the Skykomish flooded. His son Craig says the Roesler operation ran “way above industry standard for injury.”

In the 1990s, logging restrictions meant to protect spotted owl habitat cut the old style of logging by millions of board feet, practically overnight, in the visitor bureau’s telling. Today mechanized feller-bunchers work the slopes above the valley, crews are smaller, and old-growth forest is no longer harvested. Meanwhile the valley has filled with newcomers. The bureau counts close to 8,000 new homes, most of them built since the pandemic. In 2023 Copple expected about 2,000 new residents to attend their first Shindig.

Joshua Randall wants those newcomers to see the old practices. He appreciates the games, he said, because “the event brings together the old guys in the valley and keeps [the logging spirit] alive.” He also sees a shortage of young competitors. “I see very few participants of the next generation,” he said. “We’re trying to pull new people [into the lumberjack games].”